BLOGGING GOLD!!!

I hoard. No, not crazy hoard as requiring to continuously get bigger and bigger houses to accommodate the stacks of full boxes hoard. But I do have a hard time letting go of books and magazines.

Thankfully, the internet has helped reduce the need to buy the magazines, but I still like my books, so every now and then, I go through a stack of magazines that sit there occupying valuable book shelf space.

Today, I found blogging gold! Gold I tell ya!

I found a copy of OMNI magazine from 1990! The stuff this can hold is beyond belief! I mean think about this people. We can now apply 21 years of hindsight to what was then at the time, out there science.

What’s that? You think I’m being stupid? I’m being typical me? Well let me tell you a tale of the very first word…

OMNI would start it’s magazine for the month with a “First Word”. It’s a small piece by a well known author or scientist. In this case, a Sheldon Lee Glashow, winner of the 1979 Nobel prize in physics. A big wig! And you got to love a Sheldon!

In this piece, Sheldon discusses the possibilities that would unfold once the new Superconducting Super Collider in TEXAS is built.

Wow huh? Yep. In 1990, it was full steam ahead for what would be a massive 54 mile diameter ring & be what would have been the largest collider in the world in…… Waxahachie, Texas.

Sheldon went on to theorise that the collider could help discover the origin of mass. No. Not the religious kind, but if you are into this stuff, a religion in and of itself. He even hoped it would help in the search of the Higgs mechanism.

You may also be realising that this is what is happening at the Large Hadron collider. Ah… what would have been for America.

So what happened? Well, it got down to money.

During the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, and it gained the enthusiastic support of Speaker Jim Wright of nearby Fort Worth. By 1993, the cost projection exceeded $12 billion. A recurring argument was the contrast with NASA’s contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), a similar dollar amount.

Critics of the project argued that the US could not afford both of them. Early in 1993 a group supported by funds from project contractors organized a public relations campaign to lobby Congress directly,but in June, the non-profit Project on Government Oversight released a draft audit report by the Department of Energy‘s Inspector General heavily criticizing the Super Collider for its high costs and poor management by officials in charge of it.

A high-level schematic of the lab landscape during the final planning phases.